The King's Playground - A Vast World

Chapter 1: Home, bitter home - Part 5

Hamad was studying the documents spattered around the table as Abel was passing out on a carpet on the floor, his hands bandaged. He had troubles coming to a conclusion on the letters, since his knowledge of Vrain was limited. To him, it seemed only to confirm their previous suspicions, but Abel had told him not to jump to conclusions when he arrived, so he kept from it. He would have to wait for the man to wake up to really understand the situation.

Everything that involved the royal family could be a horrendous mess, like the princess's birth. It was still commonly discussed among the beduins, especially the surprising fact that people did not took more that a few days to stop venting about the strangeness of it all, it did not even spread North the Naem sea. Hamad's clan was persuaded that there had been some corruption of grand scale that day, not that poor Al'Malika had anything to do with it. He could bet a whole kidney, not his own hopefully, on the fact that she had no idea why he had such a bad reputation in general. In fact, he was going to do so, as soon as Abel would be awake.

Speaking of the devil, the man stretched himself out on the dusty floor.

"Honestly, Hamad", he blurted out, "worse night of my life."

"Maybe because your sleep lasted ten minutes at most," tried Hamad?

"No, moron, that was after the sun rose."

"Oh please accept my infinite excuses," Hamad exaggerated, "Ô highly intelligent creature."

"I could never."

"Tragic."

"Shut your mouth, would you? I wanted to complain and I'm being shut down. I had to tuck in Sarh'Illana, can you imagine?" He struggled to say, words seemed to strangle him.

"How did it come to this?" He squealed, offended.

"If only I had your answer, my friend."

Hamad snickered before hushing his friend to help him. If he would not sleep and recover, than he'd better try and be useful, not that he had not been, but let's not keep his brain from slowing down before he dies of old age. Abel went over the letters with him, and even with his skill in this tongue, Abel was not able to understand the entirety of them. The grammar was thrown around in weird, multi-meaning ways and it seemed as such ever sentence had at least two meaning to it. It mostly confirmed what he believed already, but most of those implied that there was another meaning to them, without revealing it.

One of the last letters sold it to Abel. It referred to Malika as "the daughter". Abel almost laughed. Idiots. They had just revealed that this was not only a political play over the throne, but an actual hatred towards the princess, and the receiver of those letters (the inquisitor of the attacks) was a parent of Malika. And Abel knew about Malika's birth. It could be the prince Al'Bendal Hamir, or it could be her only other family member left.

Abel had a gasp when remembering that one stupid theory he had years ago, when Sarh'Illana would try and discipline his arse by yelling atrocities at him. What if she was not the woman she pretended to be? What if instead of being a distant cousin to Malika on her mother's side, who suddenly appeared in the guard and climbed ranks like a few steps, she was the deceased, faceless, almost queen, mother who brought Malika in the world, and draped her in scandal and shame simply by bringing her life... He slammed the letter on the table and blurted out

"Sarh'Illana is trying to assassinate Malika because she's her mother!"

Another silence resulted in a baffled answered from Hamad.

"You think way to much before speaking. I'll need your trail of thoughts right now, or else I'll have to have you restrained..."

"You know what I'm talking about." He started rambling. "Al'Bendal Hamir was what? Fucking twelve in 1421? How can he father a child at this age? We all know her mother either cheated or carried the child from before. It would have covered her in shame, so everyone said that she died during childbirth. The same year, Sarh'Illana joins the military and quickly becomes the most valued soldier ever? I'm not buying that. You're not buying that. Why is everyone else buying that?"